Simeon Rice

(On TV, March 2022) The lower you go on the scale of low-budget thrillers, the trashier they become. Never mind the subtlety of higher-grade efforts, or the imagination displayed by a competent screenwriter working with an ambitious director—when it comes to straight-to-TV offerings, any premise that doesn’t immediately reach for exploitation is wasting its time. So it is that BET-broadcast thriller Unsullied (an unusually candid title for an exploitation film) doesn’t understand finesse in putting together its plot: our protagonist is a young attractive black athlete, and our villains are white men who get their kicks kidnapping and torturing women. The first act piles on one contrivance after another (apparently our villains are always ready to kidnap), but by the time we’ve looped back to our framing device, the film has put its cards on the table: two white men hunting a black woman, no one around to help, one past trauma to resolve (the disappearance of her younger sister) and a grimy exploitation atmosphere. The director is ex-NFL athlete Simeon Rice and he doesn’t do that badly—although he’s clearly held back by his own brute-force script and limited production budget. It’s not without its rough efficiency—and the beautiful Murray Gray does offer a compelling reason to watch, especially considering how her character is rarely at the mercy of the antagonists (pursued, tracked, betrayed: yes, but not necessarily assaulted or abused). Still, this is lower-end suspense filmmaking: cheap, fast and rarely in full control. It’s a rather curious choice for BET Channel, considering how easily you can find better picks… but maybe there’s something in here that I don’t see.